Getting in to a good set of hand files

Thanks for the eBay link, it's on the way to me

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Tony, that set goes for almost $300.00, retail. Seller said it looks unused; if so, you got a great deal!
 
+1 on the Nicholson files from Mexico I took a risk and ordered a set at a steep discount and have been very happy so far. We will see how they last but for the money they work well.
 
One of my 10" Nicholson lathe files is made in the US, another is made in Brazil. My Grobet Vallorbe one is Swiss. I guess you have to look at the country of origin before buying anything nowadays.
 
One of my 10" Nicholson lathe files is made in the US, another is made in Brazil. My Grobet Vallorbe one is Swiss. I guess you have to look at the country of origin before buying anything nowadays.

Most definitely! As you know true of companies like Starrett & Mitutoyo & many others. Grobet too, IIRC the Grobet USA line, some are made in China, some were made in India.
 
I picked up several black diamond files from a flea market, they have done very well for me after cleaning them up and putting handles on them.
 
Good stuff is made everywhere in the world. It is not really fair to diss whole countries for the quality of some of their exports. We just need to judge it for what it is, and that can be a moving target. I remember when Japanese and Taiwanese exports were terrible. It is often what is ordered by first world countries, and if they demand the very cheapest stuff, that is what they will get. It is not really correct to blame the exporting country as a whole for filling orders in the ways buyers demand. Still, we want to sort out the chaff and find the treasures,, so we pay attention to the sources of our tools. We should probably pay more attention to the brokers who make the deals, though that is not often knowable.
 
Good stuff is made everywhere in the world. It is not really fair to diss whole countries for the quality of some of their exports. We just need to judge it for what it is, and that can be a moving target. I remember when Japanese and Taiwanese exports were terrible. It is often what is ordered by first world countries, and if they demand the very cheapest stuff, that is what they will get. It is not really correct to blame the exporting country as a whole for filling orders in the ways buyers demand. Still, we want to sort out the chaff and find the treasures,, so we pay attention to the sources of our tools. We should probably pay more attention to the brokers who make the deals, though that is not often knowable.

Very well said, Bob. Cleveland Tools went to Mexico and I cannot tell the difference between the US and Mexican made tool bits in use, although my preference is the older US-made Mo-max bits.
 
Good stuff is made everywhere in the world. It is not really fair to diss whole countries for the quality of some of their exports. We just need to judge it for what it is, and that can be a moving target. I remember when Japanese and Taiwanese exports were terrible. It is often what is ordered by first world countries, and if they demand the very cheapest stuff, that is what they will get. It is not really correct to blame the exporting country as a whole for filling orders in the ways buyers demand. Still, we want to sort out the chaff and find the treasures,, so we pay attention to the sources of our tools. We should probably pay more attention to the brokers who make the deals, though that is not often knowable.

Hi Bob... Please don't take this personally because you seem like a fantastic person and I, literally, seek out your posts among a small handful. So with that important forward to this, I could not disagree more profoundly with your statement about pattern-matching on the country parameter and it is based not on things I've heard but on direct relevant personal experience.

The fun part of my job for 35 years was 911-type response to designs that would not come on line... "rescue consults". My phone would ring and my butt is on a plane that day or the next to, typically, a room full of smart guys with advanced degrees from name brand schools who have spent weeks or months trying to make their prototype work reliably, but which is producing low-frequency-of-occurence failures with "symptom migration" (the failure indicator moving around). I transitioned early on from "examine the design" to "examine the designer". My time solving the problem went from weeks to hours because it turns out people are WICKED massively predictable.... I just have far too much data on that point to worry about it being reversed in my final years. There is a very strong age component, and off the scale for one group the last 15 years. There is a very strong company culture component.. Until a few years ago, I could tell you the huge differences in the kinds of design screw ups companies around your location. And there is an equally huge regional component that showed up in the "error complexity"... was it a stupid mistake one of my former students should have nailed in their sleep or was the guy operating in dense, challenging complexity/innovation most wouldn't even think to attempt. One of those is Germany and one of those is India... I'll let you guess:) The point being paying really close attention to all the human factors that surround screw ups put food on the table because it's effective.

I get why products move... note comment on "slob enabling". That's pejorative by design. I don't respect how easily product and service arbitrage takes place either on the customers pressure side of the equation or the talking haircuts all using the same play book instead of actually thinking for a living. The unfun/crappy part of my job for 35 years was running my company (dumbest thing I ever did was start it). I worked closely with big companies on a business level, mostly director and up, to combine our tools/patents with their products. I ended up with a lot of data on this subject of regional differences and the "thinking" that went in to it as well as the significant vulnerabilities and long-term costs it creates for the manufacturer. I resented the living hell out of the great engineering/product cultures around this and other western countries that were literally disassembled, permanently so consumers farther and farther down the economic spectrum can "participate"... utterly and completely abandoning any responsibility to the early adopters.. the innovators... the actual SMART guys in the customer base who made their product space possible in the first place. Slob enabling always displaces a product or service space backward. Nothing good happens. It takes great cultures and institutions apart and destroys them.

I used to fly. A lot. 150kmi typical year. United had this AWESOME fleet of little old ladies DEN, HNL, SFO, DTW and maybe a couple of others that helped out "1k fliers"... before flying was all Greyhound refugees... that could take a travel problem about to take money off your table and elegantly make it go away. Ungodly amazing skills. They KNEW me... They KNEW the system... They SLAUGHTERED problems every single call. United canned them and gave me a call center in India... no matter what you needed it wasn't in their stupid sing-song fault tree and it ended in "I'm terribly sorry Sir". The beautiful thing that organically formed over decades was summarily executed and replaced by utter know-nothings because they work for $8500/yr instead of $75k/yr and that made some talking haircut look good one month. Screwing their best customers in the process. And themselves. Bigger is more vulnerable/fragile and tight margins across vulnerable/fragile customers also makes you more vulnerable/fragile.

I realize well that "sucks" or "rocks" are stochastically expressed ratings... they aren't causal but more statistical. Things don't suck because they were designed in India but that result tends to be well-correlated to the item under consideration, particularly if you are a sophisticated/selective user.. it's your best bet. One can view it as blame, or one can alternatively view it as data-driven decision-making. I can't put seeming to be nice (when I'm truly not!) ahead of making the best possible decisions.

It's not just me... since mid-1990, I sit in on a business study group every Monday I'm not busy with 7 other company owners... up to 9-digit sales. No hot dog stands. The bulk of that time has been how to make our respective companies great and how to be a great place to work. It's almost NEVER about money.. it's alway about excellence. Money chases excellence.. not the other way round. Slob-enabling has been much discussed and studied with regard to its impact on a whole plethora of aspects by each of us for a long time.. decades now. Yes.. the crowd of potential customers from the middle and left side of the big Gaussian get cheap products and services. But at a cost.. the innovation train tends to grind to a halt too because the guys who made up the old market were viewed as disposable.. they drove innovation. Not the new guys. The probability of institutional collapse soars. Know-how embedded in the institutions are lost and it can't be recreated ("dark ages effect"). And lots of people suffer so the lower boundary of the addressable market can be pushed down.

Recognizing regional performance norms just works. It's not the totality of making a successful decision but it's in there. It's first order. And remember what I said at the beginning... nothing personal here. I'm disagreeing as strong as I can politely with your idea but still plan to go looking for your posts after I send this. You take care.

LOL.. this thought just barged into my head. I had a Royal Enfield in college. Lucas electrics (headlight would famously just "go out" when I was hauling a$$ on moonless nights thru woods in town here).. my college assigned me a parking space because it leaked oil like the Exon Valdez and they only wanted me to ruin one space. Total POS. Oh.. it finally backfired thru a carb and burned thru a fuel line that wiped out the whole bike. I remember my dad asking "What could they have done to that thing to make it less reliable????". I just realized they ultimately figured that problem out:)
 
Great post, Clock work. I do know and have much experience with what you speak of. Yes, slob enabling. My original post was written from the standpoint of the clueless retail buyer, not an insider in any way. In that case, we must make our decisions based on incomplete data. Our personal experience, plus, to a greater or lesser degree, input from others' experiences. Making smart decisions in that environment is not easy (in fact, almost impossible), but we try to use the data we have and what we can glean to pick our best choices. In a near vacuum, we can blame everyone, do nothing, or do the best we can with what we have. Failing having better data and knowledge, we make the best guesses that we can... This type of end user decision making process takes place billions of times every day, and life goes on, imperfectly...
 
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